IGES import, whoa nelly

[IonSteve]

Folks--

I have heretofore imported IGES files without much trouble. This evening I imported an IGES file and quite a bit of stuff seemed to be missing, so I sent the same file to a friend with SolidWorks to see what he got when he opened it. Huge. Difference. See attached. The one with all of the nice stuff is what he got, the one with half a case is what I got.

These are the SAME file. I know that under the hood SW and Alibre are very different, but I had thought that opening a file was opening a file. Any thoughts or input are very welcome.

Thank you to all and happy holidays.

Steve

2012 Expert (the software, not the operator)

 

[scotte]

Steve,
I had similar issues with some Ford engines, except the SW guys did not have much more luck than Alibre. It was originally modeled with an unknown and probably exotic software which exported some stuff that
Alibre (and others) just couldn't make sense of. You could have your SW guy export it to a stp and try importing that.
Cheers,
Scott E.

 

[bigseb]

Importing non-native formats can be tricky. Sometimes it helps playing around the import settings but even then there no guarantee that your post-import work will be successful. Often I have no choice but to remodel the entire part from scratch in Alibre. Might seem like a lot of extra work but it sure beats the headaches from working with dodgy models.

 

[IonSteve]

FYI, on this topic, I downloaded and used CAD Exchanger with quite impressive results (see attached). It imported with fewer errors than SolidWorks, ProE or, obviously, Alibre. I opened the same IGES file and then used it to export a STEP file which Alibre opened with out hassle. The only import problems with CAD Exchanger were that it lost all of the part names, whereas SW and ProE kept the part names . . . but lost some parts.

All the best--

Steve